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Comment by arcanemachiner | Hacker News Reader

I paid $300 to get my last windshield replaced. But I have an older car and no bullshit sensors that justify jacking up the price.

I _hate_ newer vehicles. So much fluff and I can't disable 3/4 of it.

I drove a newer Ford Escape that had a broken sensor somewhere. It has a feature called "adaptive cruise control" where it detects the distance between the driver and the car in front of them, and adjusts the spacing accordingly. It uses a sensor of some sort to accomplish this feat.

A related sensor stopped working so, naturally it reverted to the regular kind of cruise control right? Wrong! Because the feature for the adaptive cruise control stopped working, it disabled ALL cruise control functionality.

And don't even get me started on the fucking spyware built into that vehicle (and other newer ones).

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> Because the feature for the adaptive cruise control stopped working, it disabled ALL cruise control functionality.

Better be thankful that you could still drive :-)

Failure modes seem to have gotten so much worse during softwareization. I suppose it's something about software culture and the expectation of "that can't happen" and expecting fixes to be simple ("if this happened they'd just have to re-install").

One example that comes to my mind often since I learned about it is the Subaru module that would drain cars' batteries because it got stuck in a re-connect loop, costing many millions in repairs, brand damage and "inconvenience" (it literally bricked the car). It could all have been avoided by thinking about failure modes for a few seconds, yet the software team (likely one tired guy in the middle of the night) didn't.

This is an excellent point. Rivian didn't have a "basic cruise control" without the following feature that adjusted speed, but they later added the basic/dumb cruise mode.

Failure modes are definitely an afterthought for new gen cars with the fancy sensors - I think it's a problem with gas and electric cars.

Absolutely! Newer cars are a tech nightmare. I'm much happier keeping older vehicles on the road than even considering the issues on newer ones. The problem for me now is that if I don't do all the work myself, it is getting harder and harder to schedule a mechanic to do it. Everyone is booked up and I keep getting the impression they generally don't charge enough to feel like they are making good money even at crazy high rates. It's a west coast thing with the incredibly high cost of living.

My BMW’s adaptive cruise’s sensor was once covered in snow, causing the feature to be unavailable. Luckily, regular cruise control remained available.

What about the turn signals?

/oblig :-D

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